Thinkpads Forum

I just replaced my thinkpads cmos backup battery, and during the time that I would boot my computer with the errors that came up some time around there my hard drive would stop working. I would boot my laptop and get the backup battery error. I'd put in the date and time in, but then instead of booting to windows it would give me an animation to insert a floppy disc. I could hear that the hard drive was not spinning at all when I booted up, only after either taking out and putting back in the hard drive and restarting the laptop several times would the laptop boot windows from the hard drive. also there are screws missing form the HD, I took them out when I thought my laptop was dead... but I put the hd back in and it wasn't until later thatit started turning off and not working. So I was wondering why my laptops hd is turning off. Also if I bump the laptop I hear the hard drive power down or do whatever it is doing. I'm not sure what the problem is.

Your boot order probably needs to be reset; that information was maintained by the cmos battery.

Enter BIOS (powering the unit on while holding down F1), and set the boot order to floppy first, CDROM second, and hard disk third. (even if you don't plan to boot off of the other two, this is the preferred boot sequence)

Exit and reboot, and you should be back to normal.

Rob

If it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, it sounds like a hardware problem. I'd replace the hard drive.